The Blue Touch Paper (20 page)

After a couple of frustrating years in the job, I was more than happy to stop being literary manager. I don't think I could have kept my sanity and gone on reading countless plays with titles like
Mend My Shoe, Tell It to the Bees
or
Fame Hath No Pity
. Christopher himself had always been needlessly kind to me, going out of his way to act as a loyal and calm intermediary in what were often bruising differences of opinion. I had found myself in the position of a futile lobbyist, trying to get the three
artistic directors to stage work by writers for whom they had no sympathy. I had succeeded in getting Howard Barker played at the Court, but to my other suggestions the powers remained stubbornly and often rudely resistant. Their intransigence came to be reflected in my own. When, against my counsel, the three had insisted on mounting an indifferent prison play of Frank Norman's to open their autumn season, I had slipped out of the eventual production at half-time, knowing I didn't need to see any more to feel vindicated. But Lindsay, observing my empty seat for the second half, had next day called me in and, in barking Anglo-Indian tones, given me an imperial dressing down. It climaxed in my sacking. It was, he said, unforgivable disloyalty for a literary manager to walk out of a first night in his own theatre. What sort of behaviour was that? But when at the end of the week I went to collect my little green packet of wages from the huts at the back, the accountant laughed and said no one had mentioned my being terminated to him, so why didn't I just carry on? When I next saw Lindsay, he seemed unsurprised that I was still around.

Now I had no opportunity to respond to my unexpected promotion to resident dramatist with a new play because I was already kicking myself for agreeing to do an English version of Pirandello's
The Rules of the Game
, which Anthony Page had bravely asked me to adapt for the National Theatre. Awed as I was to be allowed into a rehearsal room with Paul Scofield and Joan Plowright, I was aware that my own contribution was downright poor. I had just enough technique to handle my own view of the world, but sorely lacked it when handling someone else's. Scofield, who on his day was as fine an actor as ever lived, was never well cast when jealousy was the motor. It wasn't in his nature. While at university, I had taken a summer
job tearing tickets as an usher at the Old Vic, and had watched the National Theatre's embryonic company of actors in productions of
The Recruiting Officer, Trelawney of the Wells
and
Love for Love
. Now, only a few years later, here I was with my director in casting sessions with Laurence Olivier, of whom I was frankly terrified. He had recently been very ill so his neck was enclosed in an alarming salmon-pink brace. If you spoke, he would choose to answer by turning his whole body in your direction and fixing you with the famous gimlet stare. I learned to stay silent. Everyone always claims that when he was off stage Olivier looked like a bank manager. But with this apparatus he looked more like a creation of Frankenstein's. He might as well have topped the whole thing off with a bolt through the neck. When Anthony tentatively proposed the name of an actor he was thinking of employing, Olivier, demented, gave the four of us in the tiny room the full back-of-the-circle command performance. ‘I will not have that man in my theatre. He is a rank amateur!'

Although youth is much the greatest asset anyone can bring into a theatre, it is not a cure-all. When the pit pianist at the Theatre Royal Newcastle, where we were doing a try-out, asked me what sort of play
The Rules of the Game
was, I stupidly replied, ‘Italian'. To his obvious dismay, Paul Scofield walked out at the first performance to the strains of ‘Poppa Piccolino'. When we got to London, we were one production in a doomed programme of expansion for the National into the New Theatre in the West End. The season, which saw off both Scofield and Christopher Plummer, was only later redeemed when Olivier was talked into playing James Tyrone in O'Neill's
Long Day's Journey into Night
. There was nothing the old actor-manager liked better than coming to the rescue when others had failed
. Selfless, we paved the way for him. But any disappointment I might have felt was balanced out by events in Sloane Square, where, throughout the run of
Slag
, the sun always seemed to be shining. I loved sitting on the steps and watching the House Full sign being put out. Nothing had ever excited me more than having my photograph taken with John Osborne, whom I regarded as the gatekeeper, the person who had made things possible for so many others. I had been far too nervous to address a word to him. One week after another, I got ravishing glimpses of what the upside of being a playwright might be. As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel
The Hours
, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it
was
happiness.

Not only had Max turned up from Edinburgh in his E-type Jag to do a beautifully accomplished production, but the three actresses, Lynn Redgrave, Barbara Ferris and Anna Massey, had an upbeat approach. The play was already proven. Their job, they said, was to make it sparkle. I enjoyed their company as much as I enjoyed their acting, and nothing made me cheerier than stepping out with the three of them for an Italian lunch in the King's Road. They were all as witty off stage as on. Anna became another close friend, someone with whom to be solid in the darkest days, hers or mine. When Noël Coward came to see Anna in the play, we all lined up in the foyer to greet him afterwards, and he shook my hand. ‘Ah, the playwright,' Coward said, summing up the evening in a way with which I couldn't disagree: ‘Five good scenes and one terrible one.'

Part of the charm of Chelsea was that it was full of unexpected people, especially American actors and directors who had come to escape the pitiful contraction of the Hollywood they had once loved. Sometimes there seemed to be more of
them than us. If it was one of those days when you didn't pass Ava Gardner coming down Sloane Avenue, then never mind. You'd still pass Lee Remick. One day, on my way to rehearsal through Eaton Square, my heart stopped when Henry Fonda loped by, his walk as distinctive as his radiant blue eyes. James Baldwin, believing Fonda must be black, had written of him, ‘White men don't walk like that.' He was in blue jeans and a brown fringed suede jacket and clearly lost in thoughts of times and places miles away from SW3. It stopped again when the phone rang and it was, of all people, Stanley Donen, asking me to write his next picture. It turned out that the world's finest director of musicals lived in Montpelier Square in a private house with its own lift. After a short upward journey, I met a man whose dour demeanour did little to evoke the carefree gaiety of Gene Kelly or of Debbie Reynolds. The script he asked me to reorder was a mournful hand-wringer, derived from Fellini's
8½
, about an over-privileged director who is having trouble getting himself together for his next film. It was called
One
. It ended with the director spurning his shoot and heading instead for a desert island. My heart sank. I had been hoping for
Singing in the Rain
.

Deep into what was becoming a blissful summer, Margaret and I decided to skip town. We set off for a Greek island. Because we liked it so much, we stayed. Or rather, we moved to another. And then to another. I'm not sure we ever knew some of their names. One was somewhere near Mykonos, where, with no signs of permanent habitation at all, sculptural young Scandinavians, French and Germans lay stretched out sleek like cheetahs, entirely naked on crescent beaches, their skin the same colour as the sand and the setting sun. It was Arcadia. At each large island, a telegram would be waiting at the post office
from the Royal Court management, presumably sent scattergun across the Cyclades, pointing out that I was contractually out of my holiday period and ordering me to return immediately. We laughed as we tore them up. Usually, it is only years later that you become aware that you might once have been young and lithe. For a few weeks in 1971, bronzed against the wind and with nowhere particular to go, Margaret and I were aware at the time. And the awareness made us happy.

On my return everything which had been easy suddenly became difficult. I did have a reasonable time at the Edinburgh Festival directing
Blow Job
, a typically provocative play of Snoo's which then set off on a tour. The joke was that it was actually about safe-cracking. However, when Snoo and I went on television to discuss it, Eamonn Andrews, a popular Irish broadcaster who believed himself to be a family favourite, stopped when he saw the title on his idiot boards and said, ‘I'm not saying that word.'
Lay-By
, also presented by Portable, was enjoying a gratifying
succès de scandale
at the same Festival in Snoo's louche production, partly because the Traverse cleverly scheduled it at 1.15 a.m. This gave it a special glamour. When the play later had a one-night outing at the Royal Court, with bodies being lowered on winches into vats to make jam, and hardcore pornographic pictures being distributed by actors among the audience, Lindsay Anderson, thunder-faced, whispered theatrically to Christopher Hampton, ‘I suppose this is your fault.' Here was the heart of the problem. None of the directors at the Court much liked the direction a lot of new writing was taking. They found any kind of confrontational art childish and immature. We thought Britain couldn't go on as it was. They thought it could. So when I delivered my next play,
The Great Exhibition
, plotted around a Labour MP who takes to
flashing on Clapham Common, it was immediately clear they had no wish to present it.

It would become a common stumbling block for resident dramatists at the Royal Court that the one thing they couldn't expect was to get their plays performed. Read, yes. Done, no. The Royal Court was known as a writer's theatre, but there remained a tension in the fact that it was already run, like most British theatres, by a caste of self-interested directors. Like some of my successors in the post, I found I had no advocate within the building. Originally I had been brought in to read, not to write. We had been in a forced marriage and now it was time to divorce. When I decided to resign – how exactly could I be resident dramatist when they wouldn't do my play? – the three directors succeeded manfully in hiding their dismay. After all, by walking out I was solving their problem for them. Michael Codron, who had cannily contracted me for two plays, suggested his homeless comic dramatist go back to Hampstead. The board had in controversial circumstances replaced its founder James Roose-Evans with the more irenic Vivian Matalon, who told me that he had heard from everyone that I was impossible. It didn't matter, he said. He liked impossible. Codron suggested that to direct the play we should get in the silent man from Benares, Richard Eyre. When we had eventually met at the house of our mutual friends, John McGrath and Elizabeth MacLennan, I had warmed to Richard immediately and relished his dry self-deprecation. He, at least, seemed to think the play was funny. The fact that David Warner and Penelope Wilton leapt at the chance to appear in it also encouraged us in this belief. Sara Kestelman always says that her decision to turn down the third of the leading roles was the biggest professional mistake she ever made. She's being kind.

Normally it's when a playwright is sitting in the auditorium that they overhear remarks that pierce them to the heart. At any of my plays, I can guarantee to be placed next to the person who is loudly enjoying things least. But in the case of
The Great Exhibition
, it was after an early preview as a couple were walking away from the theatre that I saw the woman put her arm round her partner's waist and say, ‘I'm sorry, darling, that was
my
idea.' That remark summed up my experience too.
The Great Exhibition
did well enough, the audience laughed, and after six weeks it was off. The cast had acquired Carolyn Seymour, the granddaughter of Moura, Baroness Budberg, who, in the late afternoons, ran a literary salon where she would regale you with stories of being the mistress of both Gorky and H. G. Wells. Rehearsals were from time to time disrupted by the blackouts attendant on the latest miners' strike. Richard did a flawless job, and for any lover of first-rate acting, time spent watching David and Penelope is never wasted. But fictions with central metaphors contain their own dangers. The metaphor tends to hang around, somehow squeezing the life out of the play, taking it nowhere. As in a bad production of
The Seagull
or
Rhinoceros
or
The Wild Duck
, my particular metaphor seemed over-obvious and obscure at the same time. The act of exhibitionism was meant to illuminate my view of recent Labour governments, prone to displaying but not doing. I certainly didn't know enough about the Labour Party to write well about it, but, in Pauline Kael's words, ‘Such is the treacherous power of an artist, that sometimes even the worst ideas are made to work.' In the bar in the interval on the first night I heard a drunken David Mercer loudly declaring, ‘Some of these jokes have very distinguished theatrical ancestry.'

The mention of Chekhov is appropriate.
The Great Exhibition
,
if I had but realised, dramatised the same dilemma as Chekhov's young masterpiece,
Ivanov
. At that point I had never heard of it, though before the turn of the century it would provide me with one of my most fulfilling experiences when I adapted it for Ralph Fiennes to play at the Almeida. A man, in my case a Labour MP, in Chekhov's a landowner, is disillusioned before his time. At the age of thirty-five, he's already burnt out and has no idea what to do with the rest of his life. In both plays, he is trying to stop himself becoming a hand-me-down Hamlet. Only one of my friends guessed that I had named my central character Hammett not to evoke Spillane, but to evoke Denmark. Like
Slag, The Great Exhibition
came without what Orson Welles called ‘the dollar-book Freud', i.e. that moment when you know the author feels obliged to offer some explanation of the work's meaning. In the case of
Citizen Kane
, it was Rosebud. But with these two plays there was none.